In Digital Insider (#18), Bill Slavicsek includes the first page of the character sheet and one page of power cards for a level 30 ranger. And while the demonstration that the app goes that high is nice the pages clearly show that the Character Builder does not generate useful data.

1) The Feats, Race Features, and Class Features sections:

The first failure here is that Wizards is trying to combine two sets of useful data resulting in a useless blob:

1. List of all the character’s abilities and selections
2. Quick reference summary of available abilities or bonues

When constructing a character or referencing the build it is always useful to have a list of all the feats (or any other selections) made for the character, but during play this information can be largely useless.  For example, under class features Prime Shot is listed and under Feats Improved Prime Shot is listed — but when in combat all I care about is that I have a +2 bonus to hit with ranged attacks if no ally is closer to the target.  The result is that even with ~30% of the page devoted to these sections, there is still not enough space to include the full list of feats and features and the necessary descriptive text to understand what the feat or feature provides.

Second, this information is also frequently a duplicate of data stored elsewhere on the first page of the character sheet: the bonuses for Defensive Mobility and Combat Anticipation are in the Defenses section, Sneak of Shadows is reflected in the Skills Section (training in Thievery) and should create an additional power card, the bonuses for Improved Initiative and Skill Focus (Perception) are included in the Initiative and Skills sections.  Space on the first page is very precious and should not be wasted on unnecessary duplication.

Third, the data is not categorized in a way that makes it useful during play.  During play grouping abilities by origin is not useful.  This requires me to look in several locations on the character sheet to find a particular ability which at high level might be modified by data that has another origin.  As in the example above, Prime Shot and Improved Prime Shot are listed in two different sections of the page instead of being grouped together or, preferably, combined into one line item.  Wizards seems to partially recognize this, because as I point out above much of the information is duplicated in domain specific sections, but they failed to follow through.

2) Wasting space with Addition

The current character sheet is the same sheet that was designed to be filled out by hand, thus it has boxes to add the expected bonuses for a particular score to ease computation.  But for a computer generated character sheet this becomes wasted space. The skills section takes up about 1/6th of the first page of the character sheet but it could easily be reduced by half with the removal of the unnecessary computation space.

I do appreciate being able to see where a particular score comes from (such as a +29 to Acrobatics), but that can be accomplished by a separate printed page that can be carried with your character sheet and referenced as needed.  This reference page would also be able to have significantly more space to explain all of the applicable bonuses and their origin.

3) Healing Section is too small

In 4E encounters take longer, which results in more damage taken and healed during combat.  This means that it is necessary to have a large box for tracking the character’s current hit points.  The box on the WotC Character Sheet is very small, which requires that the player write very small or make frequent use of an eraser — both are suboptimal solutions.  Several classes also make extensive use of temporary hit points (Helllock, Barbarian, Battlerager Figher) and will need significantly more space than is provided.

Even at the start of the Heroic tier of play, characters will encounter numerous temporary conditions (buffs and debuffs) with short durations.  The single Current Conditions and Effects line isn’t even close to be able to track your buffs let alone your debuffs — which means that the DM has to keep track of the debuffs and several of the buffs can fall through the cracks unless someone remembers.  By providing a large space with room for info on a condition and its duration players are better armed to track their own state.

4) Conditional & Additional Effects

On each attack power card there is an Additional Effects section that includes some optional or conditional bonuses/effects that could be applicable to the power.  Unfortnately this space is quite small.  There is room for three short lines of text, which is sufficient for the first few levels of play, but it will quickly become inadequate.  This 30th level ranger has 10 feats/features that provide conditional bonuses or optional effects (3 attack bonuses and 7 damage bonuses).  There is no way to know about most of them from the tiny provided space, and as I pointed out in my first point above, the character sheet doesn’t display that information either.

It is far more efficient to have your conditionals stored in a single easily referenced location rather than trying to repeatedly cram them onto each power card.

5) The Senses Section

Wow this has to be one of the most pointless sections of the character sheet.  Even the most math-illiterate newbie can add 10 to get the passive senses score — and more importantly this is info that the DM should have on hand without having to ask the characters for their score.  It just needs to be cut.

Doing it right

Soon I’ll follow up with a post showing my current character sheet and how I resolve these issues.

Here is an example, the Dwarf Fighter’s Reaping Strike:

My first issue with the cards is that they are too static in design. The generic card designs look to have been designed by people familiar with card design (of which there are many at Wizards), but that may be the problem. In card games you play with cards that are all nearly identical, but the abilities and objects for which players want cards are numerous and have large variances in the type and quantity of data that needs to be represented.

In Wizard’s gives us four major types of cards:

* Purple: the player, action point, and second wind cards
* Utility: blue cards for class utility powers
* Item: yellow cards for magic (or non-magic really) items
* Attack: the green (at-will), red (encounter), and gray (daily) cards for the remaining powers/abilities from races and classes.

In defining types of cards, they then try to create standard areas for the data normally present in powers of that type — but in many cases this just results unneeded verbiage and wasted space. For example the Divine Challenge Card:

In the body, of the card the text is squeezed down to a nearly unreadable font because of wasted space (and some unnecessary info):

* Why is there a “Used” check box on an at-will power? And in general the point of a power card is to be able discard it when used then recollect at the end of the encounter or after resting so you don’t have to check of used powers and make sure you erase your “used” marks.
* There are far too much space is used to convey the range of the power — twice.
* The power is not an attack so the “ATTACK vs. DEFENSE” area is wasted
* The “additional effects” section is empty but still exists, thus taking up empty space.
* the bottom line is entirely wasteful — we don’t need a logo on every card, nor should we need the “AT-WILL POWER” text — the card is green…

Using the card template I created in Excel, here is my Warlock’s Curse card:

While not as pretty as the card from Wizards it is very readable because the font is much larger which I could do because I did not waste space on unused boxes and irrelevant definition. There are only 7 sections:

* Name box: colorized by the refresh period of the power (green for at-will in this case)
* Keywords box: no label is present which saves space
* Action box: again no label since it is very obvious what the meaning is
* Type/Range box: one clear way description of the type and range
* Body box: in Wizard’s card the body is less than half of the size of the card, in mine it is over 3/4 of the card
* Origin and level box: similar to Wizard’s card, but no label and combined to save space
* Reference box: as small as possible with no label.

In my card not only is the text presented in a font that is readable there are three blank lines and has indentation to aide readability.

What should guide the “sections” of a card is not what may be needed for the majority of powers, but what is needed for the specific power in question. If for a specific power the character has a feet or other ability that requires additional text be placed in the card add the “additional effects” section into the card. Or if a power isn’t an attack and doesn’t have a target (such as the Halfling Racial Power Second Chance), don’t include the attack and target sections of the card. A large section of white space is better than bits of white space in unused categories.

1) Powers are largely done. All elements of a power can be entered via a generated UI and an XML document is generated that can easily be retrieved. I have two examples: Lance of Faith and Fey Step. From these documents, I will be able to generate either power cards or a reference sheet — but that is a much later step.

2) Feat entry is primarily done (there may be some improvements later), and the generation of the XML document for Feats is about 1/2 done. I do have a very simple example: Durable.

3) The schema and skeleton generated UIs for entering classes, class features, and racial traits are in place. They’ll need some improvement and model adjustments before they are functional, but that isn’t too much work — it is mostly a variation of the work I figured out for powers.

4) All major elements can be easily referenced by a GUID.

I will be continuing to work on producing generated XML for the remaining items: classes, features, traits, races.

1) I’ve named it Mulciber after the forger aspect of Vulcan the Roman god of constructive and destructive fire.

2) I started with a pretty strict relational model but while that works for most cases it failed to handle some of the exceptions well and would require a bunch of tables with heavy keyed relations. Just didn’t work right.

3) So I’m switching to an XML document based model (which will have a simpler relational model DB behind it) that seems to work VERY well. This format allows me to encapsulate both data and workflow (choices and options) in the same object. Very nice….

4)I’ve created a fully fleshed out schema for powers that holds all of the appropriate data and can take into account other factors (such as character level or feats) that impact the some values. This flexibility means that a power like the dragonborn’s “Dragon Breath” that has 6 values that vary (ability that the attack roll & damage is based on, the value of the ability bonuses, energy type of the attack, the range of the attack, the number of dice rolled for damage, and the type of die rolled for damage) — thus very specific power cards can be generated with out all of the extra verbiage that is currently present.

5) I’ve started the XML descriptions of some other elements (class, race), but they need some refinement.

I’ll probably work on the XML documents and how they stack for a little bit more — so I get a very good understanding of the workflow. Then I’ll start making document builders (WebUI to enter data to create the documents) and the database backend to store the data.

Let’s look at each element of D&DI:

1) Dragon and Dungeon magazines. These are up and running and I have been happy with the content and presentation. I really like the landscape page layout because it minimized column length and allows for better inclusion of sidebars, stat blocks, and resources. Good work Wizards!

2) The D&D Compendium. This has been a bit of a let down, but they are making improvements (posted by our favorite gnome) and soliciting feedback. But it looks like you still can’t search by keyword — such as “at-will”. [CORRECTION: You can! This makes the compendium much more useful.] Doing search right and satisfying everyone is hard as long as Wizards keeps improving the functionality, I won’t get too ranty.

3) The Bonus Tools. I suppose for “bonus items” I shouldn’t complain, but both the Encounter Builder and Ability Generator while having some limited usefulness are pretty clunky and not very friendly. If I had made them for myself I would be satisfied, but for a product for customers they need some more work.

4a) The Character Visualizer. I have never cared about the Visualizer. Creating a portrait of my character really isn’t important to me. I only have the vaguest impression of what my characters look like — it is the personality and effectiveness that I care about. Additionally since this is a Windows client application, I won’t be using it.

4b) The Character Generator. This is the application that I have been fairly excited about — to simplify my desire to find an build for optimal flavor and efficacy, and to simplify the process for those that I play with so that they don’t have to invest time into meticulously copying powers and computing bonuses. But the latest update dashed my hopes. I finally noticed that this is a Windows client application. WTF?!?! There is nothing about generating a character sheet and power cards that prevent this from being a web application. This also explains why this isn’t ready yet. Looks like I may be using what I learned creating spellbook to create a character generator of my own (for my personal, not public, use).

5) Dungeon Builder. It would be nice if this was also a web app, but since it isn’t I probably won’t be using it. Wizards believes that it is “mostly done” but since the Game Table (below) isn’t ready the primary use of the application is negated. Wizards should let people give this a try so that DMs can discover bugs now so they can be resolved before there is a crush of bug reports for the Game Table.

6) The Game Table. Another Windows client application that seems could be significantly more simple as a 2D web application. The minimum set of functionality for on-line playing of D&D is chat (voice chat would be great), a 2D map that players can interact with via their character and DM can add monsters, traps, etc. While 3D is neat-o, it is entirely unnecessary and is only add-on eye candy. But since this is a Windows client app, I doubt I’ll ever use it.

7) Pricing. Since none of the client applications are ready they’ll be staring with a “web-only” price of $4.95/month (with a 12 month commitment). This price is fair (for Dragon and Dungeon alone) and I will pony up the cash. I do hope that Wizards has thoroughly though out on-line payment — they don’t want a crush of people trying to subscribe only to fail because of some bug in the process. If after the client applications are available the web-only option is eliminated it is highly likely that I will be unwilling to pay $9.95/month (with a 12 month commitment) for D&DI — there is just too much that I won’t be able to use.

Senario 1: You are attacking a troll. The troll is unaware of you so you have Combat advantage — +2 to your attack roll.

Senario 2: You are going to attack a troll. Two of your companions have flanked the troll, and the troll is dazed from an attack by your warlock companion. You have remained hidden so the troll is unaware of you. You have combat advantage 2 ways (dazed, unaware), or 3 ways in my reckoning (flanked, dazed, unaware), but your bonus to your attack roll is still +2.

When fighting stronger opponents it is very helpful to be able to stack as many tactical advantages as possible to increase your chances of hitting and doing damage — in other words wolf pack tactics. But it doesn’t make sense to stack some of the conditions (like Surprised and Stunned). My rule:

Combat Advantage (Mental): The defender’s mental condition has been compromised such that it is less able to defend itself. The attacker gains a +2 Mental Combat Advantage bonus to attack if the defender is Dazed, Helpless, Stunned, Surprised, or Unconscious.

Combat Advantage (Physical): The defender’s physical situation limits its ability to defend itself. The attacker gains a +2 Physical Combat Advantage bonus to attack if the defender is Balancing, Climbing, Prone (melee only), Restrained, Running, Squeezing.

Combat Advantage (Tactical): The attacker (or his allies) has the defender in a advantageous tactical situation. The attacker gains a +2 Tactical Combat Advantage to attack if the defender is Flanked, Unable to see the attacker, or Unaware of the attacker.

Stacking: Combat Advantage bonuses do not stack within type, but an attacker can stack Combat Advantages of multiple types. For example, an attacker would have a +6 bonus against an unconscious opponent with a melee attack (Mental: Unconscious, Helpless; Physical: Prone; Tactical: Unaware of, Unable to see attacker).

This is more complicated but strongly rewards parties (and nasty DMs) when they think creatively to place and opponent in the worst possible situation.

Natural 20: If you roll a 20 on the die when making an attack roll, you score a critical hit if your total attack roll is high enough to hit your target’s defense. If your attack roll is too low to score a critical hit, you still hit automatically.

From a realism perspective, this rule is fine — even though the 1st level Fighter rolled a natural 20 to hit the Ancient Dragon (and thus scored a miraculous hit) she shouldn’t do critical damage because it was a fluke that she could even hit the dragon. But from a game perspective this is just an additional rule complication that shouldn’t be necessary. Just about any opponent you face should be able to be hit by a 20 + your attack bonuses (and the reverse). If not the encounter is not balanced properly. Why not just simplify matters and have a 20 always be critical?

Natural 20: If you roll a 20 on the die when making an attack roll, you score a critical hit.

My rule change would be to add a new condition to the list of conditions on page 277 of the PHB:

Flanked
* You grant combat advantage

You would gain the Flanked condition under the same rules on page 285 of the PHB, but once flanked anyone attacking you would have combat advantage.

This rule change will help encourage parties (and nasty DMs) to use the tactical roles better. If two melee beaters maneuver to flank (perhaps with assistance from a leader), not only will they have an easier time hitting, but the fragile ranged specialists (e.g., bow wielding ranger, warlock, or wizard) will be able to take advantage of the opponents compromised position.